Stan Druckenmiller slashed the number of stocks in his U.S. equity holdings and is now running his most concentrated stock portfolio in more than a year.
The value of the macro investor’s U.S. portfolio in his family office, Duquesne Family Office, remained essentially flat, at about $2.8 billion, at the end of September, according to the recently filed quarterly 13F document.
But Duquesne cut the number of stocks in the portfolio by a dozen, to just 41, after fully unloading 24 different issues and establishing only 12 new positions during the three-month period, says the filing.
The 24 stocks it liquidated represented nearly half the total number of U.S. stocks that Druckenmiller held the previous quarter. This is not surprising to people who attended October’s Robin Hood Foundation conference, where Druckenmiller told attendees he had become “really nervous” in recent weeks that something in the economy is about to break, according to an account by Yahoo Finance.
He dismissed the notion that the stock market will always go up over time. Rather, Druckenmiller revealed he had bought “massive leveraged positions” in short-term notes.
The value of Duquesne’s U.S. stock portfolio was up 20 percent from year-end, according to its quarterly filings. But it is not clear if this increase is thanks to performance, an increase in the allocation to the portfolio, or both.
Of the 24 stocks Duquesne fully unloaded in the third quarter, none had been major positions. None even ranked among Duquesne’s top-ten holdings at the end of June, suggesting that Druckenmiller was eager to consolidate his holdings with the stocks about which he had the strongest conviction.
In fact, the three largest of the 41 U.S.-listed stocks Duquesne currently owns combined accounted for nearly 40 percent of the value of the entire U.S. stock portfolio at the end of the third quarter, according to the filing. They were high-flying chip giant Nvidia, Korean e-commerce company Coupang, and cloud computing giant Microsoft.
Duquesne initiated its position in Nvidia — its largest long — in fourth-quarter 2022 and heavily added to it in the following two quarters before trimming it in the September period. Druckenmiller’s family office had first invested in Coupang — which went public in March 2021 — when it was private. Duquesne took its position in Microsoft in the first quarter and boosted the stake by a total of 40 percent over the ensuing two quarters.
Duquesne’s largest new position in the third quarter was the Class A shares of Google parent Alphabet, now its seventh-largest U.S. long position. The firm also established a new, smaller position in Vistra, a retail electricity and power generation company.
Over the past five years, the size of Duquesne’s U.S. stock portfolio has ranged from a low of $1.74 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2022 to a high of $3.9 billion at the end of first-quarter 2021.
There is no way of knowing the total amount of money Duquesne manages outside the stock portfolio.
